Is It Dunk and Done for Perry Jones?

SOLO PROJECT Perry Jones’s team doesn’t want him to fit in but to dominate — even as the team struggles.Credit
Dustin Snipes for The New York Times

Update: After this story was published, Perry Jones, a freshman on Baylor University’s men’s basketball team, was suspended by the N.C.A.A. on Wednesday, keeping him out of that evening’s Big 12 tournament game against Oklahoma. The writer reacts here.

Perry Jones III is 19 years old and one inch short of seven feet tall. He has a shy smile, a sweet nature and the manners of a young man who has attended church almost every Sunday of his life. A tattoo, inked above his left biceps three years ago at a parlor in Plano, Tex., features his mother’s name, Terri Jones, and the words “My blessing from God.” She was moved to tears when he showed it to her, then told him, “That’s the last one; no more tattoos.” (Nonetheless, he later added a passage from Scripture on his chest.)

Jones grew up just south of Dallas, and as is the case for many boys from Texas, football was the first organized sport he played. He was a quarterback and so superior to his peers that grade-school videos show him taking snaps from center and just running by everyone for multiple touchdowns a game. When it became apparent that he was going to grow taller than even the tallest N.F.L. players, basketball became his sport. He is what scouts sometimes refer to as a physical freak — not just tall but also endowed with uncommon speed, explosive jumping ability and soft hands that allow him to hold onto even errant bounce passes that come skittering in at knee level.

In eighth grade, Jones was invited to attend a Baylor University basketball game on the campus in Waco, Tex. He was still a raw player, not widely known and in some ways perfect for the Baylor program, which was not attracting the best of the seasoned prospects. Baylor’s coaches, who saw Jones play in youth tournaments, talked to him after their game, and the players made a fuss over him, particularly a big, gregarious kid from Senegal, Mamadou Diene, who just sort of naturally took on the role of team ambassador. “Mamadou embraced my baby,” is how Terri Jones recalls that visit.

Jones declared on the ride home that he had found his school, and soon after, he committed to Baylor, meaning that the team’s coach, Scott Drew, offered him a scholarship and he accepted. It was only a verbal bond, one that could not be officially sealed until he reached his senior year of high school and signed an N.C.A.A. letter of intent, but he never wavered, even as coaches from more-traditional college-basketball powers, including Kansas and U.C.L.A., sent letters to his home. At a basketball tournament at Texas A&M, when the elite players were offered a tour of the campus, Jones chose to stay in the gym and shoot baskets by himself. As his national profile grew, it seemed to him that people expected him to change his mind. “I didn’t feel like anybody was happy for me to be going to Baylor,” he told me. “They weren’t congratulating me. It seemed like people thought I should go somewhere else. But [Baylor] offered me a scholarship before I was a good player and stayed loyal to me, so I was going to be loyal to them.”

The first time I saw Jones play was in a pickup game in September with his new Baylor teammates, before the team began its official preseason practices. He was the freshman, the “young fella,” as one teammate called him. With rap music blaring from the gym’s sound system, the players were showboating, having fun and busting out moves they would never attempt under the supervision of their coaches. As is typical in such settings, almost no defense was being played, with one exception: every time Jones touched the ball, he was closely guarded, and if he broke free of his defender, someone usually stepped in and gave him a hard foul before he could get to the hoop. It was obvious what was happening. The upperclassmen were trying to toughen him up.

Quincy Acy, a 6-foot-7 junior known for his ceaseless effort and spectacular dunks, told me that he took on the schooling of Jones as a personal mission. “I’m scratching at him every day,” he said. “I’m tugging at him. I’m hitting him. I tell him even before we play: ‘I’m going to foul you, O.K.? You understand what I’m saying? I’m trying to help you and help our team.’ ”

I returned about a month later, after Baylor began practices. Three N.B.A. scouts watched from courtside as Drew and his assistant coaches put the team through drills. It was no mystery whom they were there to watch.

“Take the point, Perry,” Drew said during an intrasquad scrimmage. The scouts looked as if they were going to pop right out of their folding chairs. A near-seven-footer playing point guard? But Jones has the ballhandling skills and court vision to do it, along with the size and explosiveness to play inside and overwhelm most college big men. At certain moments, he looks like a young Magic Johnson, only a little bigger and a lot faster.

Baylor has a drill that requires players to dribble a basketball in each hand from one end of the court to the other and back. They’re supposed to do it in 22 seconds or less — Jones does so in 16 seconds, faster than any of the team’s guards. An assistant coach told me that Jones can dribble the ball from the end line, cross half court with a full head of steam, take one more dribble and get to the rim for a dunk. He is, foundationally, a runner, and sometimes when I watched him, it struck me that if he had taken a different path and trained, say, for the 400 meters, he might have become an abnormally tall Olympic medalist.

Even while he was still at Duncanville High School in suburban Dallas, the Web sites that track such things had already projected Jones as a lottery pick — one of the first 14 players selected — in the 2011 N.B.A. draft. A couple of the more authoritative ones predicted that he could be the No. 1 pick in the entire draft — the best player available from the college ranks and from the ever-deeper pools of international basketball talent. “Devastating first step . . . ability to beat most big men off the dribble with ease,” is how the Web site DraftExpress described him in a recent evaluation. “Potential superstar,” the Hoop Doctors said, speculating that he could be “the next Tracy McGrady.” HoopsHype said that the “upside he possesses is unparalleled at the college level.” The respected ESPN.com analyst Chad Ford has had him at or near the top of his mock draft from the start of the season.

The paradoxical thing, though, about Jones’s status is that he was never a truly great high-school player, certainly not a dominant one or one who scored a lot of points. But just about everyone assumes that he will be a one-and-done player at Baylor, a pure rental who stays for a single season. That has become the norm for top college players. In fact, in some projections, as many as six of the top 10 picks in this spring’s N.B.A. draft are college freshmen. The trend has changed the college game: teams with top talent do not stay together long enough to cohere, sometimes leaving opportunities for less-talented but more-experienced teams, like Butler last season and George Mason in 2006, to advance to the Final Four. And it has changed the N.B.A., making it, at times, utterly unwatchable, because the rosters are stocked with too many players who were never fully taught the game and are learning on the job. (Players can no longer enter the N.B.A. straight out of high school, as Kobe Bryant, LeBron James and many others did.)

The Baylor players practice, dress and study film amid a lot of N.B.A. imagery — the framed N.B.A. jerseys of former Baylor players; huge photos of those players on the walls of the practice gym; a shot of Ekpe Udoh, a star junior last year, shaking hands with Commissioner David Stern after his first-round selection in the 2010 draft. Baylor, though, has never landed a recruit as significant as Jones. His arrival, in some ways, elevated the program even more than its performance in last year’s N.C.A.A. tournament did, when Baylor won three games and fell one game short of the Final Four.

You might assume that if Jones left school after just one season for the N.B.A., it would be a terrible disappointment to the coaches who recruited him when he was in his early teens — then had to keep in constant contact to make sure no one poached him. (Such vigilance is known as baby-sitting.) But that is not the case. If Jones leaves, it will further validate Baylor’s program and show everyone — the media, potential recruits, influential summer-league coaches who control players and sometimes broker them to colleges — that Baylor is a place that attracts top talent and produces N.B.A. millionaires. It will make it easier for Drew to recruit more players like Jones, who then, of course, also might also leave after one season.

Baylor is the most prominent institution in Waco, a city of some 125,000 people about two hours south of Dallas that is still best known to many Americans as the site of the deadly clash in 1993 between federal agents and the Branch Davidian cult. The largest Baptist university in the world, Baylor requires its 12,000 undergraduates to take courses in Christian Scripture, which for most is familiar material. In September, the university began its first school year under its 14th president — Kenneth Starr, the special prosecutor whose investigation led to the impeachment trial of Bill Clinton.

Baylor basketball has its own tragic history. In 1927, the team bus was rammed by a speeding train in Round Rock, Tex., killing 10 people in the traveling party, including players. They became known as the Immortal Ten, and their names are called out each year to new students at the school’s Freshman Mass Meeting.

Photo

Jones was a budding football star, but when he kept growing — and growing — it became obvious that his athletic future was in basketball.Credit
From the Jones Family

The basketball program suffered an even more shocking horror, if that is possible, in the summer of 2003, when a Baylor player named Patrick Dennehy was reported missing. Several weeks later, his decomposed body was found in a gravel pit outside town. The man convicted of his murder was Carlton Dotson — a teammate. He shot Dennehy multiple times in the head.

In the aftermath of the murder, all manner of revelations about the Baylor program surfaced, including accusations of drug use among the players and multiple recruiting violations. The coach, Dave Bliss, who was fired, was said to have pressured players and their families to lie to the N.C.A.A. Baylor’s scholarships were reduced, its recruiting curtailed and, for one season, it was not allowed to play nonconference games. Among other findings, the N.C.A.A. ruled that Baylor failed to exercise control over the basketball program.

The coach hired to step into this morass was Scott Drew, who was just 32 and whose boyish looks made him appear even younger. When he accepted the Baylor job in August 2003, he had just one year of experience as a head coach, at Valparaiso University, in Indiana, where he succeeded his father, the longtime coach Homer Drew (who then returned and remains in the job). Another of Homer’s sons, Bryce, was far better known than his brother in college-basketball circles — primarily for a last-second shot that earned Valparaiso an upset win in a first-round N.C.A.A. tournament game.

Scott Drew never played college basketball. Rather than athletic genes, he seems to have been born with a gift for sales. After the murder and the N.C.A.A. sanctions, rebuilding the Baylor program — which meant attracting players who could compete in the rugged Big 12 conference with the likes of Kansas, Texas and Missouri — seemed as if it would be a long slog and possibly hopeless. Players with choices would surely go elsewhere. Even hiring assistant coaches presented a challenge. Paul Mills was on the staff at Rice in Houston when Drew recruited him for a job. “My first thought was: Aren’t y’all fresh off a murder over there? And don’t you have, like, five scholarships you’re allowed to give out?” Mills recalls. “I couldn’t think of one good reason I’d want to go to Baylor. I told him no right away.”

Drew kept calling. He asked Mills his salary at Rice, then offered to double it. Finally, according to Mills, Drew said to him: “I thought you believe in God? Wouldn’t you first want to pray about it?” So, Mills said, “I told him I would pray on it, but I was pretty sure God’s answer would be no, too.”

Mills finally agreed to come to Waco for a visit, and soon after, he agreed to join Drew’s staff, where he has remained for the last eight years. “Scott doesn’t ever give up,” Mills says. “He asks the same question over and over, just in different ways, until he gets the answer he wants.”

Drew and I arranged to have lunch when I first visited Waco in September. “Hey!” he greeted me when I was led into his office. He said that we could go out to a restaurant, but that he and his staff usually had peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches for lunch — “so if you want, you could just do like we coaches do.” I said that would be fine, and Drew led me to an alcove outside his office, where he rattled off a range of options — white bread or wheat? fat or no-fat peanut butter? honey or jelly? — then popped the bread into a toaster and made the sandwiches. We carried them back into his office on paper towels.

Drew told me that Baylor’s basketball resurrection was a matter of “climbing a ladder.” The first rung, he said, was landing players from some of the best Amateur Athletic Union programs, the summer-league teams on which the nation’s top high schoolers congregate. Another step was getting back on television. As of early March, Baylor had made 57 overall appearances on ESPN, 43 of them in this and the past two seasons. Reaching the Elite Eight last year was another step up. Perry Jones’s arrival was the next big step — as big, in its own way, as getting within one game of the 2010 Final Four.

The season, though, would not go as Drew hoped. It started poorly, with a star player, the guard LaceDarius Dunn, being arrested in the preseason and accused of breaking his girlfriend’s jaw. He was suspended for five games. (A grand jury did not indict him.) Around the same time, a story emerged that the N.C.A.A. was looking into a report that a Baylor assistant coach, Mark Morefield, sent a bizarre text message to the coach of a top high-school junior in the Midwest. The prospective recruit was from Colombia, and the text was said to imply that if he did not choose Baylor, he would be deported.

Once the actual games started, Baylor often looked like a calamity of a team, a collection of mismatched parts. While big-time college basketball hasn’t been made up of so-called scholar-athletes for a long time, we all were happy to accept its hypocrisies because the product was so good. It was pleasurable to watch great teams play. But those teams have become rarer and rarer as college ball, for the best players, has become a whistle-stop on the way to the N.B.A.

With Jones finally ensconced in Waco, the focal point of Baylor’s 2010-11 season was, inevitably, going to be its star freshman. The team might or might not win a lot of games — it might advance all the way to the Elite Eight again, or even beyond — but no matter what happened, Baylor basketball had an immense talking point. An immediate benefit of Jones’s arrival in Waco was that it propelled Baylor into the center of the televised basketball universe — giving it invaluable exposure to potential students, their parents and, of course, to elite A.A.U. players who gravitate to teams that play on TV a lot. Just about every week this season, at least one Baylor game was on ESPN, and the announcers never failed to mention that viewers were witnessing a great talent in perhaps his lone college season.

On the possibility that Jones might be the N.B.A.’s top pick, Reid Gettys, a color commentator working an early-season game from a tournament in Hawaii, said, “For Baylor, when you think about it, what an accomplishment that would be.” Another ESPN announcer marveled a couple of weeks later: “One of the top recruits in all of basketball, and he ends up going to Baylor. It’s a credit to Scott Drew, who is a tireless worker and recruiter.” Some of the announcers segued from praise of Jones to anticipation of other blue-chip recruits already committed to Baylor for next season. “Talk about who’s coming next — Isaiah Austin,” the ESPN play-by-play man Dave Armstrong said during Baylor’s victory over Oklahoma State. “Boy, is he a player!”

Drew has never been particularly popular with his fellow coaches. In 2008, he hired the A.A.U. coach of a coveted high-school player, John Wall, not a novel recruiting maneuver but one frowned upon by many coaches. (Drew did not land Wall, who played for Coach John Calipari at Kentucky before becoming a one-and-done and the top pick the 2010 N.B.A. draft; Wall’s former coach, Dwon Clifton, left Baylor after two years.) Drew has also been accused of negative recruiting, or talking down other programs, which if true would hardly set him apart from many of his brethren — although he has made the mistake of actually sending out mailings to recruits that, at the very least, were comparative in nature. A few years back, no less a figure than Bob Knight, then coaching at Texas Tech and himself not always a paragon of decorum, was said to have been offended by Drew’s tactics, and Drew sought him out at a Big 12 coaches’ conclave and apologized for a mailing that pointed out that Baylor was landing a higher-rated group of recruits. (In the mid-1980s, Knight himself pioneered a controversial tactic, the very thing that brought Perry Jones to Baylor: the recruiting of middle schoolers, with his well-publicized courtship of an Indiana schoolboy named Damon Bailey.)

Drew’s rift with some other coaches may in part be a matter of style. Baylor’s director of media for basketball, Chris Yandle, told me that he has suggested to Drew, half-seriously, that if he just once diverted from his “gee-whiz, ‘Happy Days,’ Opie image,” he might improve his standing in the basketball fraternity. But it’s not in him.

Basketball and profanity go together like, well, peanut butter and jelly. Even some coaches in the women’s game are known for their blue language. Drew does not curse, nor does he countenance it from his players in practices or games.

I was watching game tape with the team one afternoon. It was taken from a television feed and screened with the sound off so coaches could provide commentary and instruction. But at a certain point, Drew turned up the volume so his team could hear the voice of a player whose words were captured by an ESPN courtside microphone. “Is that F-bomb something you want the world to hear from you?” Drew asked, as his team groaned and laughed. “Is that what you want your mama to hear? Is that what you’re about? What we’re about?”

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LOYALTY Jones committed to Coach Scott Drew in eighth grade but will likely play for him only one season.Credit
Greg Nelson/Sports Illustrated, via Getty Images.

Drew himself said he believes that whatever problems he had with other coaches resulted from his surprising success and are mostly in the past. “When we first got here, if we beat somebody, that coach could get fired over it,” he said. “Considering where we had been, it was assumed you should not be losing to Baylor. Now, if we beat someone, they can go home and not get fired.”

Perry Jones’s father, Perry Jones Jr., is a mountain of a man — about seven inches shorter than his son but much wider. He has a gruff exterior but a sentimental core. As I sat with him and Terri in the living room of their small home in Lancaster, Tex., he told me how they first met on a playground basketball court when they were both in their late teens. He was shooting hoops at one end, and she was playing in a game with friends at the other. He had recently moved to Texas from a small town in Louisiana to find work. “I saw her, and I noticed how beautiful she was, so I went to talk with her,” he recalled. “We had these coincidental things in common. Our names rhymed. We were both born on the 18th of a month. We even liked the same basketball team, the Detroit Pistons. Right away I felt like we were meant to be together.”

Perry Jones Jr. has a small business that sells wooden pallets, copper and aluminum. His wife is the supervisor at a grade-school cafeteria and also preaches at local churches. They are raising Perry’s younger brother, along with two nephews. She told me that Perry would read the younger children their bedtime Bible stories when she was not available, without anyone having to ask him to do so. In school, he was chosen to be a peer mediator, his mother said, “the one who says to the other kids: ‘Why are you fighting? What are you hoping to accomplish?’ ” She went on, “He is just an all-around good guy, but when it comes to his basketball, everybody says he’s too. . . .”

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Her husband, at this point, chimed in with the word she was looking for. “Soft,” he said. “They say he’s too soft.”

Jones began this season by playing much as he had in high school — like someone whose immense abilities were apparent to everyone but himself. Instead of making assertive offensive moves, he was too eager to pass the ball. At practices, coaches actually had to point out spots on the floor from which he could take one big step and dunk the ball.

In midseason, a Baylor practice was interrupted by a scary event — a player suffered a seizure and had to be taken away by ambulance. Jones went to the hospital, as did Drew, two assistant coaches and the team’s athletic trainer. When I asked Jones about it later, he said that he was not really closer with this teammate than with any other, and he did not seem to realize, until I pointed it out, that he had been the only player at the hospital. “I just wanted to know he was O.K.,” he told me. “I didn’t feel like I wanted to leave until they said they were going to sign the forms and release him. He’s like family. If it was me, I would want someone to stay there who was on my team.”

It’s a little hard to imagine Michael Jordan being the sole player at the bedside of a stricken teammate. Sports superstars generally have gladiator personalities. They want to take all that is theirs — the shots, the glory, the money, the women — and then some. If they are too aggressive or greedy, their coaches hope to rein them in. Jones will never wreck a team’s chemistry because of selfishness. He has the physical gifts to be an N.B.A. All-Star, maybe even a historic player, but has a true superstar ever had the soul of a nurse or, for that matter, a peer mediator?

On television, one dissenting, caustic voice has run counter to the prevailing Perry Jones mania: Bob Knight, retired from coaching and now working as a commentator on ESPN. While covering a mid-January game between Baylor and Kansas, in which Jones struggled against two talented upperclassmen (the twins Marcus and Markieff Morris), Knight said he would not make Jones a first-round draft pick, let alone No. 1 overall. Jones scored 20 points, but he looked lost on defense and managed only two rebounds in 38 minutes of play. “If I’m going to spend a lot of money, I like to get something for it,” Knight said.

Judging by his comments on the air, Knight still does not seem to like Baylor — or Drew — much. (Knight’s son is now the Texas Tech coach.) But whatever his faults and possible biases, Knight, a Hall of Fame coach with 902 wins, is not stupid about basketball, and his comments cannot be dismissed. “Perry Jones and everybody involved with him,” he said during a subsequent broadcast, “better think about making him a great college player rather than a great pro prospect.”

Fran Fraschilla, another former coach who appears on ESPN broadcasts, who unlike Knight has been an enthusiastic booster for Jones, told me that as much as he loves Jones’s potential, he wonders about his temperament. “Let’s face it,” he said, “most superstars are jerks, or they have that side to them. It goes with the territory. I don’t know if this kid is even a little bit of a jerk.”

Jerome Tang, an assistant coach at Baylor, told me that a player’s on-court mentality can be altered. The process may be more subtle, say, than altering the release point on someone’s jump shot, but it can be done. “To have a kid like Perry, who cares what other people think, there’s no downside to that,” Tang said. “Some people feel like they’re stars, and they’re not. That, to me, is a problem. With Perry, it’s a coaching challenge. You have to teach him to dominate. I’ve told him, you have to develop a split personality, like an alter ego, and when you step on the court, you become that different person. When you’re not on the court, you can turn back into the Perry Jones your parents raised and that you like to be.”

I was in Waco the night that Jones began to emerge from his shell and give a hint of the player he could become. Baylor was hosting Bethune-Cookman, from Daytona Beach, Fla., the sort of so-called cupcake opponent that top-level teams schedule to run up victories before the start of conference play. At halftime, Baylor led by 16 points. Jones had not scored a point. He had not taken a shot. He had two rebounds.

In the second half, he scored 15 points, grabbed seven rebounds and made one assertive play after another — driving slam dunks, offensive rebounds, steals, a blocked shot, a full-court dribble off a defensive rebound leading to a no-look, Magic Johnson-like pass to a teammate.

Later, I asked his teammates what had energized Jones. “We talked to him,” Fred Ellis, a reserve guard, said.

I asked who in particular talked to him.

“We all did,” he said. “Pretty much the whole team.” He said they told Jones a version of what he had been hearing since he arrived on campus. No one wanted him to just fit in; they wanted him to dominate.

Ellis, who has earned his diploma and is in graduate school, referred to Jones as “an anomaly” on the basketball court. “Or you could say he’s a freak,” Ellis said. “That’s what we call him sometimes. There’s stuff he can do that a man his size should not be capable of. So as his teammates, we just try to tell him that it’s his responsibility to fully use his talents.”

Photo

Coach Scott Drew.Credit
Charlie Riedel/Associated Press

No one around the Baylor program says that Jones does not play hard, and it has never looked to me that he is dogging it. He runs the court, rebounds, plays defense (though not always well). He exerts himself in practice and is said to be the team’s hardest worker in the weight room. He is a ripped 230 pounds, a “classic basketball body,” Charlie Melton, the team’s strength coach, told me. “He’ll go into the N.B.A. at 235 pounds, 240 at the most.”

The word used by Drew and others around the team is that Jones “defers.” But the pleas of his teammates and coaches have had an impact, a big one. By the end of February, he was averaging more than 16 points a game in conference play with an offensive repertory that mixed dunks, jump hooks, an assortment of spin moves near the hoop and a smooth midrange jump shot. He was hitting 58.5 percent of his shots, a very high percentage and was near the top of the conference in offensive rebounds — a sign of aggressive play. “His scoring average in the Big 12 as a freshman is higher than it was in his senior year of high school,” Drew said. “I don’t know if anybody’s ever done that.”

It has not always been easy to ascertain Jones’s true abilities, because the Baylor team is so deficient in fundamental ways, particularly in the decision-making of its perimeter players, who have committed an appalling number of turnovers. Dunn, the shooting guard, has the opposite problem of Jones: trying to do things he his not capable of doing and putting up several crazy-looking shots in every game. On one occasion, he slipped to his knees while dribbling, then launched a 3-point attempt before he was fully upright. The clock shot wasn’t running down; apparently he just liked his chances of making it.

As the season progressed, it was not clear if Baylor would even make the N.C.A.A. tournament, which begins this week. (Baylor’s chances probably depend on its winning several games in the Big 12 conference tournament.) In an early-February game, Jones just about single-handedly preserved his team’s N.C.A.A. tournament hopes when he scored 27 points — including all nine of his foul shots — in an overtime win at No. 16 Texas A&M. It gave Baylor its first victory over a high-quality opponent to offset several nonconference losses to poor teams.

Not long after that game, we sat in the otherwise- empty Ferrell Center, Baylor’s home arena. “I realized it was like a behavior,” he replied when I asked him about his passive play early in the season. “It’s not something inside of me that made me play a certain way. It was a behavior that I can control and change.” He said he now understands everyone’s expectations. “If I can dunk on a guy, dunk on him. If he’s slower and I can dribble around him, do that. If I’ve got an advantage in a matchup, be aggressive.”

It should not be surprising that Jones, at 19, comes across as a great big kid. He has never had a job other than occasionally helping his father, loading and unloading his truck for a few bucks at a time, and the likelihood is he’ll never need a job outside of basketball. The Baylor players, even the freshmen, live in apartments rather than in campus dorms. Jones eats a lot of pizza. He spends his downtime watching “Family Guy” and other animated shows. He is a paintball aficionado and took his own paintball gun, sidearms and ammo packs to school. He describes the day he played paintball with all his Baylor teammates, before the season started, as “probably the most fun I ever had in my life.”

A good student in high school, Jones told me he was disappointed with his 2.8 grade-point average in the first semester but felt a little better about it when he learned that some of his teammates were hovering just above 2.0. His favorite class is Christian Scripture, “because I know what the professor’s talking about.” He found his theater class boring, especially when it delved into Chinese and Japanese theater, and his chemistry class a struggle.

I asked him how he felt about the N.B.A. scouts who sat in the practice gym, then began coming to Baylor games in swarms. When I watched Baylor play Texas in Austin, more than a dozen scouts and team executives were seated right behind press row — including scouts representing Cleveland, Sacramento and Minnesota, who are at the bottom of the standings and likely to pick early in the draft. (An additional presence may influence how Jones thinks about the pros: his mother has a degenerative heart condition that could ultimately require a transplant. Going to the N.B.A. might take him away from her, geographically; on the other hand, with a pro contract he could relocate his family and help pay for her care.) “You just have to see the scouts as spectators, regular people watching you,” he said. “Otherwise you could crack under the pressure. If I just play and act normal like they’re not there, everything will fall into place.”

At home games, Lawrence Johns, who was Jones’s A.A.U. coach, sits in a spectator seat at the Ferrell Center right behind the Baylor bench. He is a big man with a broad smile, 44 years old, a Louisiana native like Jones’s father. When Perry was in sixth grade, he was part of the first team Johns put together — 10 boys, 8 of whom soon defected to another A.A.U. team. Johns put together a new squad and coached Perry through high school. When Perry grew his hair into cornrows, Johns personally cut them off. “Those aren’t for you,” he recalls telling him. “You’re nice. I want you to look nice.” When Jones got some acne, Johns brought him ProActiv skin cleanser to clear it up.

Johns told me that he is writing a book about Jones, and so far has completed nearly 900 pages. The first time Jones stepped on the court for Baylor, Johns cried. “I tried to hold back the tears, but I just couldn’t. All this stuff was happening for Perry, and so fast, it was just overwhelming to me.” Johns had Perry watch tapes of N.B.A. players with skill sets similar to his — Magic, Tracy McGrady, Kevin Durant. He also showed him film of Secretariat’s Triple Crown races. “He’d say to me, ‘Why are you bringing a horse into this?’ I’d say: ‘You keep watching this. You’ll get it. This is a very fast athlete with a big heart.’ ”

The world of elite summer basketball is famously full of sharks, men who position themselves as go-betweens primarily for their own financial gain. Johns did not give me the impression he was one of them. By definition, though, the A.A.U. coach is a complicated figure in college basketball — an absolute necessity to college coaches, a potential pipeline for players, but someone who must be managed. A couple of other highly regarded players from Johns’s team have committed to Baylor and will play for Drew in the coming years. (Baylor also recently got commitments from two heralded recruits from an A.A.U. program in North Carolina run by Brian Clifton, the brother of Dwon Clifton, John Wall’s former coach. Each recruit revealed his intentions on ESPN by saying, “I’ll be taking my services to Baylor University.”) Johns, meanwhile, continues to be a big presence in Jones’s life, and from his seat behind the bench, shouts out encouragement. At one recent game, Jerome Tang wheeled around and said, “Brother, quit coaching him!” Jones, the mediator, as always, told the coaching staff later that he looks to Johns for motivation, not basketball instruction.

Johns told me he felt a need to stay close to Jones. “I had him so long,” he said. “These coaches here will have him briefly. Soon, it’s not going to be fun and games. It’s going to be a business.” He showed me his cellphone, which was overloaded with messages. “Fifty a day,” he said, from agents or runners for agents who want to negotiate Jones’s first N.B.A. contract.

You can hardly hold it against Jones for feeling the pull of money, but he would certainly benefit from another season playing in college. He would face the chance of being injured, but turning pro prematurely is likewise not without risk. As the regular season wound down, I called David Thorpe, a private coach who prepares prospects for the pros and who writes for ESPN.com, for his opinion on Jones. “He has elite athleticism,” he said. “That’s a seismic impact. It’s difficult to make an impact without that. His floor is that he’s going to be a very good N.B.A. player and a potential All-Star, and that alone makes you a high draft pick. But that assumes he goes to a team where his spirit is not going to be crushed, like Kwame Brown’s was,” he said, citing the case of a gifted, 6-foot-11 player who at age 19 was drafted as the first overall pick in 2001 by the Washington Wizards and has averaged as many as 10 points a game only once in a decade of N.B.A. play.

Does Lawrence Johns, Jones’s mentor, think the player will return to Baylor for a sophomore season? “Come on, man,” he replied, when I asked him. “What would you do? He’ll leave. You looked at these draft boards. NBADraft.net. ESPN. Everybody’s got him top five. No one expected this. That’s what you work for.”

The structure of elite amateur basketball, right up through college ball, points a few players toward a personal payday, and tracking them as they advance toward the promised land is a mini-industry unto itself, part of the sports-entertainment machine. A drumbeat builds. A player is elevated to the status of future millionaire. The announcers who work N.C.A.A. games, including the bombastic Dick Vitale, who coined the phrase “diaper dandies” for talented freshmen, echo and amplify the hype on the online N.B.A. draft boards. It is all fused together into one great futures market. One morning I was with the Baylor team at its pregame chapel service. An assistant coach, by way of telling the visiting preacher about the incoming talent already committed to Baylor, said, “We’ve got two more N.B.A. first-round picks coming our way.”

There is a circularity to this, a kind of senselessness in which recruiting becomes a game within a game, divorced from the traditional goals associated with a team. Perry Jones III will most likely lead to some version of Perry Jones IV, Perry Jones V and so on — big-time prospects will be drawn to Baylor because it’s a basketball program that signs big-time prospects. Baylor made Jones a better player this season, but he is unlikely to ever become a mature college player, one who develops over time and grows alongside teammates. If he decides to leave Baylor after one season, some N.B.A. team will make him a high pick and an instant millionaire based solely on his potential. His first pro coaches, though, are likely to wish he had gained more experience in college. Tough enough for the Big 12 is not tough enough for professional basketball.

When we sat in the Ferrell Center that afternoon, Jones told me that he would take up the question of his future after the season, which is what players in his situation almost always say, except for those who vow to stay, then change their minds when confronted with N.B.A. money.

Scott Drew likes everything about Perry Jones and laments that he may never again get to coach someone with his combination of physical gifts and personal character. Drew may, in the end, advise him to stay, but he is unlikely to ask him to do so — especially if Jones ends up as the likely top pick in the draft. “We’d love that to be the case,” he said, “because then we would have done our job as coaches, which is to serve our players as best we can and help them meet their goals and dreams, but if he wanted to come back, we wouldn’t say no.”

Postscript: March 13, 2011

The cover article on Page 26 this weekend profiles the Baylor basketball player Perry Jones III and cites him as an example of a player who might jump to the N.B.A. after one college season. After the article had gone to press, Jones was declared ineligible by the N.C.A.A. for the beginning of the Big 12 tournament, for “pre-enrollment amateurism” and “preferential treatment violation” having to do with three loans from Jones’s A.A.U. coach to his mother, which were said to have been repaid in a “timely” manner. Baylor is contesting the N.C.A.A. decision and is seeking to have Jones’s eligibility restored. For developments on his status, check the magazine’s blog, The 6th Floor, at nytimes.com/magazine or reports at nytimes.com/sports.

Michael Sokolove (mysoko@hotmail.com) is a contributing writer for the magazine and the author of “Warrior Girls,” about the injury epidemic among young female athletes.Story editor: Dean Robinson (d.robinson-MagGroup@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on March 13, 2011, on Page MM26 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: RENT-A-CENTER OR POINT GUARD OR SWINGMAN. Today's Paper|Subscribe